How Many Meals to Eat Per Day as an Athlete
You’ve probably heard about Intermittent fasting, where you condense your meals into a short time of the day (say 8 hours) and don’t eat outside of that (say for the remaining 16 hours).
The theory here is that during the ‘fasted’ portion of the day, you’re burning more fat, with the aim of increasing fat-loss.
You might have also heard the other end of the spectrum, where people have promoted the idea of eating smaller meals more often in order to “stoke the metabolic fire”.
The theory here is that each time you eat, the body has to use energy to breakdown and digest that food, so total daily energy output increases as a result, leading to fat-loss.
This dichotomy present a few problems.
Firstly, it only takes into account fat-loss, which is only a small element of what improving nutrition can help achieve, especially for athletes.
Second is that is positions meal frequency as a key driver of fat-loss.
And thirdly, either option diverts from most people’s natural and preferred style of eating, which generally involved 3-5 meals/snacks spread throughout the day.
So, let’s look at a few goals, and assess whether or not it’s worth veering from the standard breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a couple of snacks set-up the most people enjoy.
Fat-Loss
On one hand, there is evidence showing that eating fewer meals per day tends to lead to people spontaneously eating fewer calories, and therefore increased fat-loss.
What we can possibly take from this is that if you’re aiming to lose fat, but don’t want to count calories, it may be worth trying to eat fewer meals per day.
On the other hand, when people consume the same number of calories, the number of meals through which they consume those calories has no effect on fat-loss.
This suggests that if you prefer to eat more meals, as long as that allows you to control your calorie intake, there’s no physiological fat-loss disadvantage to doing so.
The upshot is that as long as your calorie intake is such that you’re in a caloric deficit, the number of meals you eat per day can be based on your personal preference.
Some people’s daily work schedule dictates what works best for them from this perspective.
Others like to alter the size of their meals to manage daily energy fluctuations or digestion.
Some people get hungry if they spend long periods without food and end up overcompensating.
Others are left feeling unsatisfied with the small meals they might be having if they’re eating more meals.
For what it’s worth, with the clients I work with, success with fat-loss generally occurs with the normal eating pattern of breakfast, lunch, dinner, and 1-2 snacks per day, rather than a very low or high number of meals per day.
Muscle Gain and Recovery
Muscle Protein Synthesis (MPS) is the creation (synthesis) of muscle tissue that occurs when we eat a sufficiently large, high-quality protein source, and/or when we engage in resistance training (lifting weights, for example).
The body is constantly in a state of both breakdown and synthesis of all of its tissues, and muscle is no exception.
For this reason, optimising the synthesis (building) side of that equation is crucially important for your recovery and muscle/strength gain goals.
Logically, based on the above, you might think it would make sense to aim to ‘spike’ this MPS response as many times as possible per day, which might lead you to conclude that more meals per day would be better.
However, studies have shown that aiming to do this any more than about 5 times per day doesn’t bring any extra benefit.
The same research also showed that ‘spiking’ the MPS response 3 times per day provided almost the same benefit as 5 times per day, as long as the same total protein intake was consumed within the whole day.
This leads us to the conclusion that eating 3-5 protein sources per day is optimal for increasing muscle protein synthesis, and therefore helping optimise your recovery and muscle gain.
With that said, there is some recent research that might challenge this, suggesting that as long as protein is equated throughout the day, getting it through 1-2 meals brings equal benefit.
Logistically, however, given the protein requirements for athletes, getting your protein intake in within 1-2 meals may be much more difficult than 3-5, so with most clients, again, I advise sticking to the standard daily meal set-up.
However, if someone prefers eating fewer meals per day, it may be worth experimenting with, ensuring total daily protein intake is adequate.
Fuelling and Re-Fuelling
Getting your nutrition right around training sessions and competitive events can have a significant effect on your performance, as well as your recovery and adaptation.
For this reason, both the pre-training and post-training meals should be seen as a key part of any nutritional approach.
If you’re only eating 1-2 meals per day, this may make it more difficult to optimise these meals, especially given the increased calorie and carbohydrate requirements of athletes.
For example, if you’re only eating twice and trying to consume a lot of calories in a day, your pre-training meal might become a very large meal, making it harder to digest and leaving with the feeling of a full stomach going into the session.
Or you might purposely make this meal smaller, but that means your total carbohydrate intake leading up to the meal could become less than ideal.
On the other hand, if you’re an athlete trying to eat 6+ meals per day, you’re likely to find it difficult to find the time to get all those meals in around your busy training schedule.
All of this again makes the 3-5 meals per day target a good one for most athletes.
Conclusion
Based on all of the above, and especially for athletes, sticking with a standard meal set-up of breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a snack or two is likely to be the best option.
Of course, if you prefer a frequency of eating that goes above or below that, it can certainly be done, but if you’re expecting to see major advantages to doing so, you might be disappointed.
Article Written By Conor O’Neill
P.s. You can find out more about Performance Nutrition Coaching HERE.